Related computing systems, such as virtual machines running on a common host machine or physical computing devices connected to a common network, may often encounter instances of the same file or files. For example, a high percentage of files within virtual machines that run the same operating system or service pack and/or originate from the same base image may be identical. Because of this, related computing systems may redundantly perform identical or similar resource-consuming computing operations on instances of the same file.
For example, if 30 virtual machines that originate from the same base image and run on a common host are instructed to perform a periodic malware scan of all files, these virtual machines are likely to collectively perform 30 different malware scans on instances of files that are shared between the virtual machines (such as common system or application files), all with similar or identical results. In addition to wasting computing resources on such redundant operations, this scenario may also swamp or overrun the resources of the underlying host machine, potentially resulting in decreased performance and/or system failure. As such, the instant disclosure identifies a need for identifying common content among a group of related computing systems and then using this knowledge to share the results of computing operations performed on this common content among the related computing systems.